PSC Meeting 2025-08-08

Participants

• Anna Petrasova
• Helmut Kudrnovsky
• Huidae Cho
• Linda Karlovska
• Nicklas Larsson
• Paulo van Breugel
• Vaclav Petras
• Veronica Andreo

Agenda

The topics proposed are:

• GRASS presence on different events
• Release 8.5
• New docs status
• Website rebranding status
• Mailing list removal? Question from Vicky in chat
• Decide on the Workspace topic and whether the solution suggested here can be implemented. This would help to finalize and merge this PR.
• Discussion on the workflow proposal. Perhaps we need a File Browser pane?

Minutes

• GRASS presence on different events
  • FOSS4G EU: Alen presented the state of GRASS talk.
  • FOSS4G NL: Paulo gave a presenation about GRASS in education and research
  • FOSS4G NA (Nov 3-5)
    • Workshop: GRASS Addon Development with Python, Corey & Caitlin.
    • Talk: GRASS Meets Longest Flow Paths, Shortest Compute Times, Huidae.
    • Talk: State of GRASS, Corey.
  • FOSS4G 2025 NZ:
    • Alen and Luca will attend and present the state of GRASS talk (Corey as co-author as he wrote the original abstract).
  • FOSS4G.be: Moritz will present a state of GRASS talk

• GRASS 8.5 Release postponed to fall
  • Waiting for JSON stuff from GSoC, which needs to be reviewed before release.
  • Fix r.mapcalc issues regarding parallelization.
  • Mac binaries: There's an issue with code signing. Needs to be solved before the release.
  • Release scripts are in addons, and they run in a Docker image. Still several steps need to be manual and they are different depending on the type of release, i.e., major, minor, micro or RC.
  • Jupyter notebook integration into GUI. Some things need to be defined/solved first:
    • Where to start the Jupyter server?
    • Where to store the notebooks: current working directory, let users choose, outside projects, within mapsets, provide a good default?
    • What happens when users do not have the dependencies installed?
    • It should work in Windows (both OSGeo4W and standalone installer).
  • FHS should be ready for 8.6

• New docs:
  • They are up and running, but there's still something missing on the automatic upload part (currently a personal GH token of MN is used which expires every 3 months).
  • There’s the question of whether we need to have docs updated all the time or only when we release. In that sense, this is not a blocker for the release, but a nice-to-have.
  • For this release, we do not remove the HTML files, which are mostly used locally in the GUI or when called with g.manual from the terminal.
  • Addon docs with new format: they work online.

• GSoC:
  • The student and mentors are working hard on adding JSON output to C tools.
  • They are obsoleting the -g flag and moving to the format option.
  • More clean-up should be done before GRASS 9 + Python tools.

• CMake:
  • We need 3 steps: FHS (PR WIP), GUI (Nicklas has a follow-up PR, but will need help with this), extensions (nothing done so far).
  • MSVC binaries are built fine, but they don’t work out of the box because of missing environment variables; Can make them work by manually setting environment variables though; g.gui fails with Python exceptions

• Vicky's questions in the GRASS chat:
  • We need to understand what they want to remove, and why; grass-user and grass-dev archives must not be removed, and neither must other list archives.
  • Anna sends an email to Vicky.

• Workspace discussion:
  • We agreed on having them within mapsets, but being asked if we want to save them or not - the opposite view is to save them automatically with a timer or so
• Anna proposed to remove the lock to delete maps in different mapsets from the GUI - check if this is independent from the owners of mapsets.